“It was the point I was approaching. Really! what should be better now than to plainly propose--since the route is unoccupied, and offers a field of cheapest experiment--a street railway with a loop around Washington Square, and then out Fifth Avenue to One Hundred and Tenth Street, next west on One Hundred and Tenth Street to Seventh Avenue, and lastly north on Seventh Avenue until you strike the Harlem River at the One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street bridge?” “What a howl would go up from Fifth Avenue!” said I. “If it were so, what then? You are not to be injured by silk-stocking clamor. For each cry against you from the aristocrats, twenty of the peasantry would come crying to your back; don't y', know! Patrician opposition, old chap, means ever plebeian support, and you should do all you may, with wedge and maul of policy, to split the log along those lines. Gad!” concluded Morton, bursting suddenly into self-compliments; “I don't recall when I was so beastly sagacious before--really!” “Now I fail to go with you,” I returned. “I have for long believed that the strongest force with which the organization had to contend, was its own lack of fashion. If Tammany had a handful or two of that purple and fine linen with which you think it so wise to quarrel, it might rub some of the mud off itself, and have quieter if not fairer treatment from a press, ever ready to truckle to the town's nobility. Should we win next time, it is already in my plans to establish a club in the very heart of Fifth Avenue. I shall attract thither all the folk of elegant fashion I can, so that, thereafter, should one snap a kodak on the machine, the foreground of the picture will contain a respectable exhibition of lofty names. I want, rather, to get Tammany out of the gutter, than arrange for its perpetual stay therein.” “Old chap,” said Morton, glorying through his eyeglass, “I think I shall try a cigarette after that. I need it to resettle my nerves; I do, really. Why, my dear boy! do you suppose that Tammany can be anything other than that unwashed black sheep it is? We shall make bishops of burglars when that day dawns. The thing's wildly impossible, don't y' know! Besides, your machine would die. Feed Tammany Hall on any diet of an aristocracy, and you will unhinge its stomach; you will, 'pon my faith!” “You shall see a Tammany club in fashion's center, none the less.” “Then you don't like 'Public Ownership?'” observed Morton, after a pause, the while twirling his eyeglass. “Why don't you then go in for cutting the City off from the State, and making a separate State of it? You could say that we suffer from hayseed tyranny, and all that. Really! it's the truth, don't y' know; and besides, we City fellows would gulp it down like spring water.” “The City delegation in Albany,” said I, “is too small to put through such a bill. The Cornfields would be a unit to smother it.”